1. Field of the Invention.
This invention has relation to the use of impact hammers for impacting a driver assembly which can receive and hold the head of a nail and can, when the impact hammer is activated, drive that nail into a wooden board or the like.
2. Description of the Prior Art.
Power impact hammers and particularly air-drive impact hammers are well known, and are regularly used with various accessories to impact these accessories to operate on all kinds of materials. For example, short-barrel air impact hammers can deliver of up to in the neighborhood of 3500 hammer-action blows per minute. The description of the accessories normally used with such impact hammers gives some idea of the various jobs they are called upon to do. The accessories used include rivet cutters, pin punches, muffler splitters, pipe and panel cutters, cold chisels, and claw rippers.
It is known to drive metal pins into a rock face by supporting the pin in a cylinder which gives lateral support to the pin. The pin is driven into the rock by a combination of pressure and vibration at sonic frequencies applied longitudinally to the pin. See U.S. Pat. No. 4,033,419 to Pennington, granted in July of 1977.
The patent to Gooding, U.S. Pat. No. 1,164,086, granted in December of 1915, shows a magnetized plunger for holding a tack while a weighted tube including a hammer is brought down against the plunger to drive the tack home. A somewhat similar mechanism is employed in U.S. Pat. No. 1,539,894 to Booth, granted in June of 1925.
The patent to Riley et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,485,307, shows a pistol grip hand tool of the prior art.
A pneumatic nail driver in which the nails being driven are dropped into a nail discharge tube or guide is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,445,674 to Kendall, granted in July of 1948. The guide includes a series of radially yielding fingers made of rubber or spring metal which hold the nail upright but which are pushed back out of the way by the driving force of the ram or hammer rod.
An automatic nail driving hammer operated by means of compressed air is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,187,692 to Oechl, granted in January of 1940. In this patent is disclosed a positioning of the nails by air into a nail centering bushing where an air driven piston drives a driver pin into the nail to drive it home.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,605,466 to Anderson, granted in August of 1952, shows an automatic tack hammer with a magnetic driver used to hold the tack until it is driven.
The foregoing are all of the patents cited in a search of a preliminary form of the present invention. Neither applicant nor those in privity with him are aware of any closer prior art or of any prior art which anticipates the claims herein.